1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to methods and products for optimizing assembly performance.
2. Background Information
Most manufactured products have many components defining many physical and operational characteristics such as, for example, measurements having tolerances. These characteristics include characteristics defined by a single component, and characteristics defined by cooperating components such as, for example, a gap measurement.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,586,052 issued to Iannuzzi et al. describes an existing rule based method for evaluating an engineering design. The methods described therein establish relationships between part features and part tolerances. These relationships are interpreted in light of a given set of completeness and well formedness criteria to determine part quality. If a part is unacceptable, a designer may then revise the tolerance plan.
Although existing hardware variability control techniques employed in the manufacturing of products have been used successfully in the past, these existing methods do not systematically identify critical product characteristics while illustrating the connectivity among different performance areas for the product such as fit, form and function. Thus, with existing methods there is little guidance available for choosing tolerances that will provide acceptable quality in the final assembly, while not applying excessively strict tolerances that increase cost.